I like Gauguin but I don't. His religious paintings, particularly
Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, are awful. His paintings of Tahitian girls however captivate me. Visually, they're sensuous, colorful, mysterious, amateurish. Emotionally, there's a sense of dread and longing. And almost as an afterthought, but perhaps the thought that lingers longest, there's the conspicuous reduction of women to symbols of sex and culture, as re-contextualized and sold by a fashionable fad ("Primitivism") of Tahiti's French overlords.
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